Mrs Gaskell Novelist Part II

Mrs Gaskell had 4 daughters by her husband, and a son who died in infancy.  She began to write to distract herself from her grief, and she had several different kinds of writing that she enjoyed.  She had a romantic streak which led her to write ghost stories, but from her work as a minister's wife in Manchester, she learned about the casualties of the Industrial Revolution, the ill fed, ill-housed working classes and she wanted to use her writing to help them. 

She did not know the working class from “inside” but she was an intelligent imaginative woman who was able to understand them better than many middle class writers. Her portrayals of the factory workers were sympathetic and well observed.  However she got a lot of criticism from the middle class manufacturers and business people, who felt that she was showing too much sympathy to the working classes and their trade unions, and demands for workers’ rights.  The well to do classes felt that as a middle class lady and a Christian, she should be supporting the status quo and not encouraging radical ideas.

She tried to write about the working class with feeling and charity, though she was, as a middle class woman, a little afraid of the dangerous ideas about unions, and “against property”, that some of them propounded. 

She knew however that they were right in their belief that they were the ones who suffered and were harshly treated, and that they had a right to a better life than they were having.  When she tried to “bring the classes together” and ask working men to understand the viewpoint of the middle class owners, she was shaken by a response from a working man “have you ever seen a child clemmed (starved) to death?”

William “backed” his wife, when she was criticised by the owning class, even if it made his life as a minister difficult.

Her earlier novels, such as Mary Barton, North and South and some of her stories, tend to veer between real sympathy and excellent observation of working class life, yet also an attempt to portray the mill owners fairly, or even, some felt, too generously.

Her most controversial novel was “Ruth” which was the story of an unmarried mother.  However, she didn’t want her young daughters to read it, and many people thought that it was scandalous to portray an unwed mother as a victim of male selfishness and an innocent girl... But Charlotte Bronte felt angry that Gaskell had to kill Ruth off... that she had to expiate her sin by death. Her Victorianism and her sense of Christian propriety warred with her generous nature and her instincts as a writer.

Elizabeth Gaskell Part I

Elizabeth Gaskell’s works have enjoyed something of a revival in recent years, with the TV version of her best work “Wives and Daughters” and also a TV version of “Cranford” has been very popular.

She was born as Elizabeth Stevenson, in Chelsea; London in 1810; her father was a Unitarian minister.  The Unitarians were dissenters, outside the Church of England, and in many ways more liberal in their social, political and religious thinking.  They were usually based in towns, and tended to attract either liberal thinkers or people of the lower middle or working class. In later life, Gaskell became friends with Charlotte Bronte, whose husband, Arthur Nicholls was very bigoted against people who disagreed with the Anglican Church…

She herself was tolerant of other beliefs, but she was still very much of a Victorian, religious and strict in her conduct.

Her mother died when she was a baby, and her father sent her to Knutsford in Cheshire to be looked after by her aunt.  This country town was a place she loved and which became the basis for Cranford, and also for the country town in Wives and Daughters.  Her father had resigned his orders in the Unitarian church, on conscientious grounds... something that would happen with Mr Hale in North and South. He tried to find other work, and acquired a civil service post.  However he was far from well off, though his wife, Elizabeth’s mother had connections with well-known prominent Unitarian families such as the Martineaus, and Darwins.

Later her father remarried and had another family and Elizabeth continued living with her aunt.  It seems as if she did not get on too well with her stepmother, and this may have been the inspiration for Molly Gibson’s unhappy situation with her stepmother – the shallow silly Hyacinth.

She has a good education in a small school near her country home and at another school in Stratford upon Avon. Her marital prospects weren’t good, due to her lack of fortune but she did have a social life, sponsored by her relatives.

However she was a pretty, charming girl, intelligent and compassionate, and in 1832, she married William Gaskell, a Unitarian Minister and moved to Manchester.  Manchester was then a city which had grown up from the Industrial Revolution.  It contained factories, and slums and the working and living conditions of the poor were terrible. 

As a minister’s wife, Gaskell was exposed to the terrible urban poverty, and learned about industrial issues.  She began to write after the death of 2 of her children, a stillborn daughter and a baby son. Her marriage was a happy one.  William, by the standards of the time, was a liberal tolerant husband who allowed her a good deal of freedom.  He was dedicated to his work as a minster, which included a good deal of “social work.  This took up a lot of his time and he expected his wife to support him in it... but he encouraged her to write and to get her work published.

Thank Heaven Fasting E M Delafield

I haven’t read all of Delafield’s novels, and I am not a fan of her most famous work “the Provincial Lady” which was so popular.  I have read some of her novels about married ladies of the middle to upper class, such as “The Way Things Are”, and I haven’t greatly liked them.   They seem to be about well-off women complaining about their servants, their husbands etc. and its hard to have any sympathy or find the plots interesting.   In these, Delafield seems snobbish and I can’t warm to her heroines.  

But I loved “Thank Heaven Fasting.”  It is about a young woman -Monica, who is just about to make her coming out in Society, in the Edwardian age.  The year isn’t given, but it’s clearly in the era of Women’s Suffrage, and strict chaperonage of young girls.  It is the world of Delafield’s girlhood, with all the rigid customs that ended with World War One.

Monica is pretty, pleasant and conventional, and eager to please her parents by getting married soon.  She also has a normal desire for pleasure and a normal sex drive, although she’s very innocent.   There are no money problems, she does not need to marry in order to live comfortably... but she knows in her bones that it is every woman’s duty to get married as soon as possible...

It is important to marry someone of suitable birth and breeding who has the means to support a wife... but in the end, getting a well off husband matters less than “just finding a husband of any kind”.  At first, she has an admirer who seems suitable, Claud.  He is well bred, has a career and is comfortably off... and she likes him.  But before long, she knows that her mother and father will be glad of any man of the right class, even if he does not have much money… or is older...or in some other way not all that desirable.

Monica has hopes of Claud -right from their first dance, but her friends Frederica and Cecily, the daughters of a hard selfish society woman, are much less lucky than she appears to be.. They are shy and plain, and they cling to each other obsessively because they know that their chances of marriage are slim, and that their coarse-fibred mother despises them for being lacking in charm and sex appeal.

But Monica makes a disastrous mistake.  Not long into her first Season, she gets into a heavy flirtation with a soldier, Christopher, who is only interested in a bit of fun.  Her parents discourage the relationship, because he has no money and is soon to be shipped off to India.  But he arouses Monica’s desires and she is eager to marry him... even if her parents disapprove.  
He encourages her to disobey the rules, to sneak out and meet him... Finally, she allows him to take her off during a dance, kissing her on the rooftop of the ballroom.  Word gets out about the “disappearance” and although Monica has done nothing more than kissing, she finds that there is gossip about her.  Christopher has treated her, a lady, like a little shop girl... who is good for a few kisses but not good enough to marry..
Monica realises that she has lost her “freshness” and gradually slides into a half world of “almost spinsterhood”.  She has another Season and another, and her friends (apart from Frederica and Cecily) get married.  She is left behind. She is less attractive to men.  But she keeps on hoping.  Some readers get annoyed with this book because Monica’s only goal is to marry; she has no interest in a career... or agitating for the Vote, or even charity work.   She knows that to take up full time charity work is a confession of failure for a girl of her kind.  But I can understand.. Monica is not different to most other girls of her kind and class.  Some readers want Monica to be ahead of her time, to give up "wasting her time looking for a man" and find a job, or for Delafield to rescue her by producing a husband that she can love.

Delafield however is being realistic.  Monica is who she is.  She doesn’t want to be unconventional… she wants a suitable marriage and to be the same as other girls.

And when a suitable man comes along, even though years ago she would probably have rejected him as too old and not romantic, Monica is relieved and happy…Its real life, not "romantic novel life". 

E M Delafield (1890-1943)

E M Delafield was the pen name of Edmée Elizabeth Monica Dashwood, née de la Pasture, a well-known novelist of the 20s and 30s. She was from a middle class background, and her mother was also a novelist.  She was a debutante in 1909, but a few years later, went into a Roman Catholic order of nuns.  Why she did this has never been explained.  However after a few years, she left…and when the War broke out, she worked as a VAD.  This gave her a wider experience of life than was usual for an upper or middle class girl at the time.  She began to write, first producing a novel about her time as a VAD. (Zella Sees Herself).
After the war, she married into the lower ranks of the landed gentry.  Paul Dashwood, her husband had been in the army and was an engineer, and his family had the title of Baronet.  He and his wife went out to the Malay states on marriage, as did many British professionals with such practical skills. She wanted to come back to England, and within a few years, they moved back to Devon where her husband got a job as estate manager to the Bradfield estate.  Delafield went on with her writing -but was very involved with the local society circle, the Women’s Institute etc.      
Like many of her heroines of her books about married life, she was something of a fish out of water, in the genteel upper middle or gentry circles of provincial England.  She was more intellectual than the women she mixed with.  They thought of her as odd because of her writing; her writing friends who came to stay didn’t usually win the admiration of her children.  Her marriage seems to have been happy enough –but all the same her view of marriage seems a little jaundiced.  In many of her novels about marriage, the “husband” is a dull man who loves his wife but is irritated by her, has few interests in common with her, and retreats behind his newspaper.  So it is possible that her marriage was not a close one, in that sense.

In the next part of this blog, I hope to write something about one of Delafield’s best novels, “Thank Heaven Fasting”.